Transparent Remapping of / For Struts Actions

I’ve been trying to find a solution to this issue for a couple of hours: We have several struts actions in our Java-based webapp, all neatly mapped through different .do action handlers. I wanted to switch our handling of the root / index URL (http://www.example.com/) from being a static redirect to the actual action to instead present the content right there, without the useless redirect. This apparently proved to be harder than I thought; after searching a lot through Google, reading through mailing lists and the official documentation, it seems that there is no way to specify an action to handle these requests by default in struts. There may be one, but I could not for the life of ${deity} find it.

As simply doing it in Struts were out of the question, I turned to an old friend of mine, the ever so helpful mod_rewrite. mod_rewrite is capable of rewriting URLs internally in Apache before they get handled at other levels. The problem was that mod_jk seemed to grab the request before the replacements were made, but a few resources pointed me in the correct direction:

The RewriteLog say that we should log the rewrite progress to /tmp/rewrite.log, and RewriteLogLevel say that we should log at the most detailed format. Use 0, 1, 2 for less debugging information. Remember to comment out these lines when things work. DO NOT use the RewriteLog when not actually debugging the rewrites.